Talk:Character Creation/@comment-61.6.238.108-20190707150034/@comment-45075715-20200218215014
How'd you get use out of guns (arquebus)? I got so excited to see them added, made CKO units equipped with them, and found them absolutely horrid in just about every scenario while trying to stubbornly find a way to make them reasonable. Even for siege offense where I thought they'd excel most, I find siege crossbows still far, far, far, far, far superior as far as kill rates even against troops with lots of shields and heavy armor. The reloading times are just too much in my opinion to make guns all that useful in my experience unless you found a particularly nice way to use them. Personally I always go with combat beasts for PoP. Whether I go for power draw or power throw or x-bow with more skill points to invest elsewhere is one of the key decisions I make. Yet I like all three ways (maiden x-bow on a mount actually fires pretty quickly and packs a real punch if your x-bow profs are high and not too inferior to horse archer, and throwing is actually pretty damn good with the best throwing weapons), but the constant is that I always go with combat beasts and keep putting points in STR and AGI when I level up until my desired combat skills are close to max and I can equip the finest equipment and mounts in the game. This is optimizing/powerplaying for early game, not late game (if you want to optimize for late game, you'd avoid adding STR and AGI points on level up and favor Arkon Elixirs instead while putting all points into INT, but I find that maddening as far as difficulty and patience required). This is not based on preferred playstyle (in most mods besides PoP, I prefer to avoid combat beast and play more of a commander sitting back and letting my armies demolish the enemy) but just preserving my sanity. I find PoP most difficult early-mid game and a breeze late game once you start being able to recruit KO units and especially once you start getting sufficiently-upgraded CKO units. By late game, I don't find a sub-optimal character build to be so punishing when I can get a measly 30 CKO knights and defeat an army of 300 or more or even take out noldor spawns without external aid using only those CKO knights. By that point, my character/companion skills and equipment cease to matter much except maybe surgery in the rare event that one of my CKO units gets knocked out. Leadership isn't so important to me since it's also easy enough to get so much money with the proper investments and ability to breeze through battles with a small number of troops late game. With a sheer combat beast build, I can rack up denars and renown and not struggle too much with tourneys (including Elacrai tourneys) early game. It takes no time at all for me to establish enterprises in every single city in the entire world (I can do this in a matter of a few hours with a combat beast build as well as get to level 20+ with all the kills of high-level units my combat beast can take out with bow, x-bow, lance, or even occasionally melee). Then I start getting denars like crazy in the hundreds of thousands, maybe working towards a million, and then I switch my focus to mid-game where I start recruiting lots of troops which are free by that point since their upkeep is far lower than the money my enterprises are bringing in. Even with low leadership, I can also get a fairly good number of troops by this point since my renown is so high. I sometimes even skip being a vassal outright and just declare war myself independently on a faction and siege a city solo and defend it like a maniac while slowly building up CKO units which will ultimately steamroll everything (defending my city or tower while doing this is the most difficult part of the game with the way I play). I don't rush qualis gems or noldor relations or bother to clash with minor faction leaders early on. I take my sweet time with that until my CKO units are able to take them out solo without fancy kiting and aid. I use my very first qualis gem from Rane for the CKO. CKO troops are so OP once you invest enough into them that everything else is background for me. For CKO troops I favor mounted sword and board and especially a sword with very high speed rating like strange ebony saber with 112 speed rating until we unlock the fastest noldor swords along with bow like hawkstorm until we can unlock noldor composite bow. They demolish everything with that setup and I haven't found anything more effective in open battles -- for siege offense x-bow might be better but I find my CKO units obliterating sieges anyway even with bow and even when they run out of arrows (their super fast swords and heavy armor still slice through the remaining enemies like butter) to not concern myself with the differences. I even once took out the Singalian Army with over 300 enemy troops using only 15 CKO knights not yet fully-upgraded (they had not yet been equipped with noldor equipment). Not only did they defeat the army but I only got 1 or 2 wounded IIRC, and they killed so quickly that the epic battle was over within 5-10 mins or so while my game log was flooded with cyan text of my CKO units massacring the army. I discovered through lots of trial and error experimenting with CKO equipment that very fast melee speed rating seems most helpful for OP CKO besides the horse archery, and there's a fine balance between too much weapon reach and too little for the AI to use the weapon most effectively (personally I prefer more reach the merrier if I have to make a tradeoff since I can attack from a safer distance without exposing myself to the enemy's melee counterattack from a mount with the longest weapons, but the AI doesn't seem to use the longest-reaching weapons that effectively from a mount as opposed to the speediest mid-ranged weapons -- they still miss a lot with long reach but a fast weapon lets them swing a lot like maniacs and connect to something). Tanky horse also beats faster horse on AI in my experience, since even the enhanced AI can still occasionally do something dumb like charge into a crowd and find themselves surrounded by troops on all sides and stuck -- and the tanky horse and fast melee weapon can potentially save their life in that circumstance and allow them to cut their way out of the crowd. My whole powerplay style revolves around the CKO, so to speak. My character build is only so that I can unlock and afford those heavily-upgraded CKO units as smoothly and as quickly as possible, and for that I find nothing easier/smoother/faster than a combat beast. Once I get those upgraded CKO units, my character/companion skills cease to matter for the most part except surgery, engineering, pathfinding, spotting, and prisoner management mainly for minor spawn leaders and qualis (but I tend to take my chances without putting too many points in PM unless I've managed to drink a lot of elixirs and still have some level ups to put points there -- I cease to focus on combat skills once I got CKO units). Looting doesn't even matter that much to me by that point since I'm racking up denars left and right from enterprises and battles and loot even with low looting skill, and even the most elite equipment I can loot isn't that useful to me when it doesn't affect my CKO units. For party skills I mostly use a companion or two like Leslie. I don't bother with rune equipment like runed bow and such these days -- I use my first qualis gem for CKO, start pouring resources upgrading them, and then it's just sit back and watch them obliterate. I might as well be wearing no armor and have no weapon at that point and it'd make little difference. I used to rush runed bow (my favorite was sapphire over popular ruby) and that was fun and extended my play time with combat beast, but once I discovered how powerful CKO troops can be, I've revolved all my powerplays around rushing CKO. One thing to note about PoP is that its troop design makes for vastly skewed power differences between the lowest and top-tiered units to the point where the top-tiered units are almost immortal against low-tier troops (their attacks tend to bounce off the high-tier armor without causing any damage) and slice through and shoot through mid-tier left and right like butter. Quality absolutely demolishes quantity. But this also means that the trainer skill isn't all that useful when your top-tier units are often level 35+ and take ages to train. I don't find it very fruitful to play vanilla style recruiting from villages and trying to train main faction troops. I actually don't even bother to put any points into trainer in my character or any other companion. Instead I tend to skip that whole process and go for KO and CKO units ASAP while mostly soloing with a few companions with a combat beast to rack up money and renown early on. If I recruit troops, it's from enemy prisoners, taverns, or KO/CKO. I tend to skip village recruitment outright except for cheap garrisoned defense.